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Monday, 29 June 2015

Blog TouR: Tameless by Jess Gilmore

For most of my teen years, I lived under the same roof with Wes Proctor.

He was a surfer. He was cocky and popular. Guys wanted to be him, girls wanted to be with him.

There were times I was attracted to him, and times I hated him. Wes had a caring, protective side, but also a strong self-destructive one.

When he left our house at 18, it was sudden, like he vanished, and I never knew what became of him. My parents never said. They didn’t allow his name to be spoken in the house.

Now he’s back, we’re seven years older, and we’ve been thrown together once again by the most unlikely of circumstances.

There’s a lot of baggage. There’s a major trust issue. There’s secrecy.

And there’s sex. Amazingly hot sex.

He’s mature now and on the right track. His loud cockiness has turned to a quiet confidence. But Wes still might have that dark side. I don’t know.

In the span of just a few weeks our lives will be changed forever. We’ll find out there was always more between us, an unspoken and irresistible desire that is reignited all these years later. But all of that will be tested when it becomes clear there was more to what made him leave all those years ago, and Wes wasn’t the one with the worst secrets.

He sipped his beer and leaned forward, placing his arms on the table, looking very interested in what I was about to say.

“If you had asked me to guess who you’re dating now, his name wouldn’t have even dawned on me.”

I tilted my head and rolled my eyes. “Very funny.”

“Hey, I had to get at least one in there for old time’s sake.”

We were referring to him using the word “dawn” and how he used to tease me about it. When we were teenagers—fourteen, maybe—he would always try to work that word into a sentence. “Dawned on me.” “Darkest before the dawn.” Once, at the pool, he had a perfect opportunity to use “crack of dawn” when I got out of the pool quickly and the back of my bathing suit bottom slipped down slightly.

His favorite might have been “dusk til dawn” because sometimes he’d call me “Dusk” but never in front of anyone else. He used that one infrequently, saying there was a darker side to my good-girl personality. It annoyed me a little, but it grew on me, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t end up liking it. I was the good girl, never getting in trouble, and I think I wanted to believe there was a darker, more daring side to me. Wes somehow saw it back then, even though there was nothing between us. Now here he was, back after all these years, talking to me like he wanted to find out.